Enterprise chief demands more impact assessments

All EU institutions should concentrate on effective impact assessments to reduce the burden of regulation on businesses, according to the director-general of the Commission’s enterprise department (DG Enterprise).

European Voice

4/6/05, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 4/12/14, 11:20 AM CET

Horst Reichenbach told a Brussels conference: “The Commission has impact assessment roadmaps to see at which stage things happen. I would encourage other institutions to follow this path.”

DG Enterprise has created a specific unit to deal with impact assessments, which he said was a useful example for other departments.

He said the methodology and training for officials carrying out such assessments could be overseen by the economic and financial affairs department (DG Ecfin) as it has the most experience.

This was in response to calls from other speakers at the conference on better regulation, held by the Alliance for a Competitive European Industry, to define a more harmonised approach to impact assessments.

The president of European engineering association Orgalime, Martine Clément, said that “homogeneity” was needed to ensure that the European Parliament as well as the member states could understand the implications of assessments for their own policymaking.

Reichenbach was also receptive to the idea of making someone in the Commission responsible for a final rubber-stamp on an impact assessment. David Arculus, chairman of the Better Regulation Task Force, said that in the UK the relevant minister always had to sign on the dotted line to put his name to a study.

“The dotted line approach is something that could be very useful and on which we can reflect,” Reichenbach said. But the director general rejected suggestions by Arculus that an external body should be set up to monitor the quality of the impact assessment process.

“We need to have a feedback mechanism of what the Commission intends to do and what impact it will have, and if we have an external body this feedback mechanism would be weakened,” he said.

But the screening process outlined in the Commission’s better regulation roadmaps should help to “gain credibility”, he said.

The Commission will, by summer, indicate sectors where existing legislation should be simplified, Reichenbach said, and will publish a simplification programme in the autumn.

Günter Verheugen, the Commission vice-president, said on Tuesday (5 April) that better regulation, based on thorough impact assessments, would be “one of the trademarks” of his mandate as commissioner for competitiveness.